Development of Robotic System based on RFID Scanning for Efficient Inventory Management of Thick Plates

Automation of inventory management in a steel plate factory was a difficult problem unresolved for a long time. And now, it is also necessary to work diligently in the steel industry on efficient inventory management of thick plates. So far, the environmental characteristics of stacked thick plates means it is not easy to apply advanced technology for their automatic identification. In this paper, we propose a thick-plate robotic scanning system based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) that can provide quick and accurate inventory management by acquiring plate information after the scanning automatically recognizes the RFID tags under difficult load conditions. This system is equipped with a crane to move the plates in a pulled-up operation. It is equipped with a plate-only linear dipole antenna only for scanning the position of the plate tag. Only the linear dipole antenna, while moving the x-axis and y-axis information, automatically identifies the tag information attached to the plate. The tag information acquired by the system is used for stockpiling and is managed by steel plate inventory control software. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified through field performance evaluation. As a result, the recognition rate of the plate tags is 99.9% at a maximum distance of 320 cm. The developed thick-plate antenna showed excellent performance compared to an existing commercial antenna.